Modern digital and communications and processing systems rely on the rapid communication of digital data between components and subsystems. This communication of digital data has been effected using a wide variety of data bus architectures. Typically, wide parallel bus architectures have been used for short-distance communications of high-speed data, as in digital processors and system backplanes. Where data is to be communicated over longer distances, serial data bus architectures, such as Ethernet, have proven effective. Busses operating under the control of a master controller are known in the art, as are peer-to-peer networks. There is, however, an opportunity to improve the performance of many systems by the introduction of a superior high-speed data bus architecture.